bbPress inside a WP Sidebar Widget

I’ve done the “deep” integration of bbPress into WPress – Not sure I needed to go that way, but just in case. It all seems to work. bbPress is running in a subdirectory of wordpress on the root. On WordPress I’m using a flexible theme where I can place and size sidebars anywhere. I have the “Samsarin PHP Widget” plug-in in Wordpres which lets me run PHP in a widget. … So here comes the big question:

What PHP do I have to put inside the widget to get bbPress to display in there?

Any help? Heck – any help getting bbPress to display as a piece of the content of a WP Page so I can put WordPress widgets around it?

Try the other way round, skinning bbPress with your WordPress widgets. Under deep integration, the sidebar functions might work fine. Maybe. bbPress isn’t light enough to just be invoked by a small piece of code in a widget though. That said, there is a WordPress plugin for displaying the latest posts and such from bbPress.

The thing is its so much easier to just use the WP theme to control the layout and other widgets – I have to mess with very little code. Hopefully just enough to get bbPress to show. So far I’ve tried calling bb-load.php with <?php ‘/home/userpath/public_html/forum/bb-load.php'; ?> inside the PHP widget but I get either no output or a path error depending what I load. Am I wrong to think I’m not that far from getting it to display inside?

I see myself heading over to scriptlance to see if I can find someone to hammer it in somehow.

Hold that thought… This was ridiculously simple and it just popped into my head as I was typing… iFrames.

Darn! It Works! All I did was create a Sidebar as the center of the page, put an HTML widget in it with: <iframe name=”FRAME1″ src=”http://andresferraro.com/forum/” width=”100%” height=”1000″ frameborder=”0″ ></iframe>

All this into a page called “Forums” … So now my bbPress in /forum is accessible by the WordPress page /forums (note the “s” – one URL will got to bbPress, the other to WordPress) and wrapped inside a WordPress page – With a WP sidebar, header, navigation and footer.. Sure, there might be some duplicate stuff between the bbPRess header/footer and the WordPress one, but it looks a lot better than breaking the site’s continuity.